


you had no mercy for me

by lukegodbaby



Series: hatef--k [5]
Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Alcohol, Eating Disorders, Gen, Hospitalization, Menstruation, Recreational Drug Use, Self-Harm, Transphobia, okay so idk how long this will be so i'll edit the tags later sorryyyyyyyy, weed that means weed
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-04
Updated: 2019-10-04
Packaged: 2020-12-01 20:44:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,141
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20893889
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lukegodbaby/pseuds/lukegodbaby
Summary: patrick's senior year





	you had no mercy for me

**Author's Note:**

> this will be multi-chap, as i decided to post smaller installments rather than a huuuuuuuge single chapter. stay tuned, i will be letting y'all know.

“Hello, class! Welcome to your senior year,” said Mr. Montgomery. “Let’s dive in, shall we?”

Toby, a jock who had a gay streak a mile wide and a girlfriend to disprove that fact, who was seated at the front with his buddies, groaned and put his head to his desk.

Patrick never knew he’d agree with a jock about anything.

Well, except _dick is nice_, for this particular one.

Oh, and _cheerleaders are cute_, for all the others.

“C’mon, Mr. M,” Toby whined. “Let us adjust. None of us want to start already, okay?”

Mr. Montgomery sucked his teeth, then pursed his lips.

“Firstly, Toby,” he said, “you will not give me a nickname. I am Mr. Montgomery to you, and that is final. Secondly, we will be beginning when I say so, not when you feel like it. Are we understood?”

Patrick sucked in a breath as some goth chick, some new kid, sitting next to him, farthest back row, whispered, “_hardass_.”

He looked at her. She lifted her eyebrows as if to challenge him. He looked away.

She didn’t know that a year ago, he would’ve agreed with her, in a heartbeat.

But roughly a year of therapy — real therapy, inpatient didn’t count, _fuck_ inpatient — had changed his mind on a lot of things.

Mr. Montgomery was establishing boundaries — _no nicknames_ — and assuring his own control of a situation he had been granted control of.

He was in the right. And Toby was being an asshole.

“We will begin,” said Mr. Montgomery, “with a tried and true prompt. An essay: _what I did over my summer vacation_. With one simple change — I don’t want to hear about the entire vacation. I want to hear about the most _notable_ thing you did.”

The class stayed silent. The goth chick shifted in her seat.

Patrick fidgeted with the bracelets he still hadn’t taken off: alternating red and black, and a solid string of white. Gifts from Samantha. Sam.

He had a necklace back home. He hadn’t been allowed to wear it in the unit, no neckwear allowed. It was the closest thing to a rainbow she’d been able to make for him with the picked-over beads left in the day room.

_Rainbows are for people like us, Trick_, she’d said. _Every color means something_.

_People like us?_

_Queer folks._

He’d winced.

_I know it’s hard to hear that word and have it be positive_, she’d said. _But it’s time to take it back._

_Yeah, I live in Bumfuck, Nowhere,_ he’d said. _I’m gonna take my sweet time with that_.

She’d laughed, and he’d looked at her like looking at the face of God.

Now, though, he was wishing he’d tucked it into his pocket. Just like every day since inpatient.

Today, he’d thought he wouldn’t need her with him.

He’d been wrong.

God, he missed her. Still hadn’t gotten a call from her, and it was killing him.

Maybe she still wasn’t out yet.

Maybe she was out and she didn’t care about him.

He wasn’t sure which one was worse: to have her in a place where people called _who she was_ a delusion, or to have her outside, and unfeeling.

He closed his eyes as someone asked, “what if I didn’t do anything all summer? Y’know, the way summer is supposed to be.”

“Then I expect you to take _nothing_ and dress it up until it feels like _something_,” Mr. Montgomery said. “Five pages, front and back, single spaced. Due by the end of class. Then, tomorrow, you will pair up and give constructive criticism to your partner. Together, you will revise your essays. The writer of the best revised essay will win five dollars, and a chance at being published in the first edition of this year’s school newspaper.”

Patrick cleared his throat. Everyone turned to look at him.

“Mr. Montgomery,” he said, “I have two questions.”

“Full steam ahead, Patrick.”

Patrick nodded, pulling, steady, on his bracelets.

“First,” he said, “is… well. How rough do you want this to be? I’m not sure I can crank this out in…” He looked at the clock behind Mr. Montgomery’s head. “Forty minutes.”

“I expect it to be very rough, or I wouldn’t be pairing you all up tomorrow. Make it rough, roll it in the dirt, but get it out.”

“Right. Uh, my second question is this… what if the most notable thing that I did over my summer vacation _isn’t_ something I want to talk about?”

Mr. Montgomery gave him a look that very clearly said, _everyone knows your dirty laundry, Patrick_.

Patrick grimaced.

“Okay, one more question,” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“What if I don’t think you’ll believe me?”

“As long as you don’t write me a tall tale,” Mr. Montgomery said, “I will believe you.”

“Right. I’ll hold you to that.”

“I expect you to. Now, class, pens to paper and mouths shut. Rough drafts due at the end of the period.”

Patrick looked down as a wave of sound rose from all around him: the sounds of pens being taken out, paper being adjusted on desktops.

He looked down at the notebook he’d been intending upon using for every class. So far, the first page was just covered in doodles of what he wanted his first tattoo to be.

He didn’t have any loose-leaf paper.

He looked up, then at the goth chick.

“Hey,” he whispered.

She looked up from where she was already writing.

“What do you want?”

“I, uh, don’t have any paper ‘sides this notebook, and I’m not gonna rip pages outta it. You got any I can use? I’ll pay you back.”

She rolled her eyes and counted out a handful of pages of loose-leaf for him, handing them over.

“You smoke?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“Bum me a cigarette during lunch, and we’re square.”

“Thanks. I’m —”

“Patrick. Yeah. He said your name.”

He smiled.

“What’s your name?”

“Lori.”

“Cool. Meet you by the library?”

“You got it.”

“Cool.”

“Patrick, please,” Mr. Montgomery said.

“Right — _yeah_ — sorry.”

“Thank you.”

Patrick looked down at the paper Lori had given him. He looked at his pen, the worn surface of the desk that would, undoubtedly, be his all year, his bracelets.

He put his pen to the paper, and wrote.

_Dear Mr. Montgomery,_

_I smoke. I used to be proud of that fact, like it made me some big, tough guy to smoke, but during my summer vacation, I gave up all my pride and freedom, and instead became grateful that I smoke._

_See, when you’re in an inpatient facility, you don’t go outside much. But if you’re a smoker, they’re required to take you out to smoke. Seven times a day, I saw the sky with nothing between me and it._

_I was one of the lucky ones, thanks to my addiction to nicotine._

_I was in there with a woman who had gotten there fifteen days before me, who was still there when I left, who never stepped foot outside._

_I smoke. I’m not proud of it._

_I went to inpatient therapy for eleven days. I’m not proud of it._

_In the Adult Unit, the rules were simple. The one that still bounces around my head is this: don’t talk about sex, drugs, or violence outside of your individual therapy sessions._

_By the time I was out the door, I’d turned it into ‘no sex, drugs, or rock ‘n’ roll’, and my roommate laughed every time._

_At first, I was upset that they put me in the Adult Unit. I’m still in high school, and I still feel like a kid. But I was too old, they told me._

_Now, I’m grateful that that’s where they put me. I’m also grateful for the room they put me in, the roommate they gave me._

_In the last moments I was in the facility, still a patient, my roommate told me she loved me. That was the first time I’d ever heard it and believed it. When your parents tell you they love you, there’s this sense of obligation, but with Samantha, it was different._

_I heard it, I believed it, and in the time since, I’ve let it kill me, again and again._

He wrote and he wrote. It spilled out of him, everything about Samantha and the doctors and the other patients. Everything except the blow job, except her last name and how he’d told her to contact him. He wanted to protect her; he wanted to protect himself.

He felt raw by the end of the essay. He felt like crying. He bit the inside of his cheek to hold back the tears.

He signed it, going with the letter concept:

_Sincerely,_

_Patrick Hockstetter_

He looked at the clock. Two minutes to spare.

He got up. He stapled his essay together. He put it on Mr. Montgomery’s desk.

“Thank you, Patrick,” Mr. Montgomery said, “for being the first to turn your essay. I look forward to reading it over lunch.”

Patrick nodded and went and sat back down.

He thought, for some reason, of the various ways they’d prevented the patients from hurting themselves in inpatient. Cutting the thread for their bracelets. Lighting their cigarettes for them.

He thought about the time the lighter wasn’t working for his cigarette, the last one of that particular smoke break, and, impatient, he’d grabbed the lighter from the nurse and lit his own smoke. He thought about looking at the nurse with fear in his eyes, how she’d shaken her head as if to tell him it was their little secret.

How he’d been stretching his arms, cigarette in hand, and he’d accidentally pressed the embers to the back of his neck, yelping. How Samantha had spun the story so that he’d been bit by a spider, all so they wouldn’t write it down in his chart as _self-injury_. How she’d begged a bit of alcohol and a cotton ball off of the nurses and had cleaned his burn, so tender and caring.

_Bye, Trick. I love you._

The bell rang. He sighed, packing up his shit.

If he was going to take this year seriously, he probably needed a backpack or something. He needed other notebooks, one for each class and one for dicking around. He needed a way to keep track of his homework, too, so that no one in their right mind would even dream of holding him back again.

In his next class, he was called to the nurse. He took his midday pills. He went back to class.

That morning, before the first bell, he’d gone to the office. He’d talked to his counselor, Miss Douglas.

“I just want to make sure,” he’d said, “that the same adjustments were made to my schedule that have been made the last two years.”

“What adjustments are those, Patrick?” she’d asked, offering him a hard caramel.

He’d taken the caramel, unrolling it and popping it in his mouth before saying, “I know for a fact that, after my freshman year went the way it did, you all made sure to schedule Henry Bowers, Victor Criss, and Reginald Huggins and I in separate classes, at any cost.”

She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. She got a caramel for herself.

“Yes, Patrick,” she’d said. “Yes, we did.”

“Was that done this year?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” he’d said.

“I… beg your pardon?”

“I’m genuinely grateful,” he’d said.

“…Oh.”

“I guess you’d say I’m turning over a new leaf,” he’d continued. “I haven’t spoken to any of them since early July, and I have no plans to be friends with them again.”

“Oh. Patrick, that both excites me and makes me sad.”

“Yeah. I miss them, but. One of them really betrayed my trust, and my therapist says I don’t have to forgive him any time soon, if ever.”

“I’m so glad to hear that you’re still going to therapy, Patrick.”

“Thanks. Me, too.”

She smiled. He smiled back.

“Well, I better go,” he said. “They’re still serving breakfast, and I haven’t eaten.”

“Good thinking,” she said. “It’s the most important meal of the day.”

“Yes, ma’am. Bye, now.”

“Goodbye, Patrick. If you need anything, you know my office hours.”

Lunch rolled around. After the bell dismissed him for it, he went to his locker and dug out his cigarettes. He didn’t know if Lori would like cloves, so he got his only other pack of normal cigarettes, menthols. Hopefully, she’d be cool with that.

He booked it across campus, outside in the late August sun. He breathed deep, thinking about how he’d give his right hand for one last smoke break with Samantha. Outside on the patio of the unit, bumming one of hers. The dull roar of the other patients bitching about anything they could, the sensation of her hand in his hair.

He missed her so dreadfully.

He got to the library, went around the side. Lori was waiting for him, getting sideways glances from other kids who didn’t know her.

“Hey,” he said, grinning.

“Hey, yourself,” she said, deadpan. “Thought you’d chicken out.”

He snorted and held out both packs of smokes for her. She chose the cloves, and he smiled.

“Why’d I chicken out?” he asked as she pulled a clove out and lit it with her own lighter.

She took her time taking that first drag and answering him.

“Well, I was gonna say,” she said, “that nobody likes a goth kid. But then I remembered who the fuck I’m lookin’ at, and how you’re not exactly vanilla. So.”

“Mm,” he grunted around the filter of one of his menthols.

Samantha smoked menthols.

“Y’know something?” Lori said.

“Mm?”

“Never thought I’d see a school worse than my old one, in terms of gossip. But gee whiz, does this place have a _lot_ to say about you, Patrick Hockstetter.”

He jerked his head back in surprise. Usually, he was the first to hear the rumor mill’s productions about him.

Well, that was when Vic Criss, his resident gossip queen, was still a part of his life.

“What are they saying this time?”

He was purely curious. And scared. Shitless.

“I had a run-in with your friends a week ago.”

“I don’t have any friends,” he said.

“That’s what everyone is talking about,” she said. “How… _pleasant_ your old friends are being now that you’re gone. _The Bowers Gang_, or whatever, minus one.”

“Hm.”

“Yeah.”

“So… what did those assholes do to you?”

“Told me and my girlfriend to suck their dicks. In gory detail.”

He closed his eyes.

“So you’re a rainbow person, too, huh?” he asked, opening his eyes.

She laughed. It wasn’t unkind.

“Yeah. I’m just a big lesbian in a little pond.”

“I, uh. Guess I’m bisexual.”

“You guess?”

“Yeah. The girl I’m in love with, she’s the first one who told me there was a word for it.”

“Huh.”

“Yeah.”

They ate their lunches in silence.

“What’s your essay about?” she asked about five minutes before lunch was over.

“It’s uh, it’s about how I met Samantha. The girl I love.”

“Mm. Okay.”

“You?”

“Saw my favorite band do a house show, took my girlfriend. It was… really cool.”

“What’s your favorite band?”

“Six Ravens. This Etna local band. They’re doing a barn show in Derry on Friday, actually.”

“Mm.”

“Keep sharing smokes with me, and I might just invite you.”

He laughed.

“Sure,” he said. “Shit, I’ll drive.”

“Radical,” she snarked.

Again, he laughed.

The bell rang shortly after. They waved each other off, going to the next class.

About five minutes in, a voice came over the intercom system in Patrick’s classroom.

“Patrick Hockstetter, please report to your counselor’s office immediately.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. When he opened them, everyone in the room was looking at him.

He got up and started the walk.

When he got to the office, he found in it his counselor, Miss Douglas, and Mr. Montgomery, from his English class.

“Patrick,” said Miss Douglas, “please, sit.”

Patrick sat in his usual chair.

Mr. Montgomery cleared his throat and held up the stapled papers in his hand, what Patrick knew was his own essay, and read aloud:

“_The third time they increased my antipsychotic dose, I thought it was just a joke. I saw stars for an hour after they set in, and Samantha held my hand through it, and I thought, ‘I’ve never known someone like you, honey, and I may never again. Don’t let go, please don’t let go.’”_

Patrick cleared his throat. Mr. Montgomery, without looking up, lifted a finger and flicked to an earlier page.

_“She was transsexual, and they didn’t care. There was no way in Hell they were about to treat her like a woman. Samuel this, Samuel that, and talk of delusions. I know what delusions are like, okay? This was no delusion. This was who she was, and every time they called her him, I saw red. I wanted to hold her and never stop, I wanted to protect her. For the first time in my life, I didn’t want to be the bad guy.”_

“Sir, I —”

“I am _not_ finished.”

“Yes, sir.”

_“My parents brought me clothes, but they never visited. Two hours is too far to drive, two hours there, two hours back, for thirty minutes in the cafeteria with shitty hospital coffee. My only visitor was Vic, just one time, and it ended with me punching a wall…_

_“They took my rosary during intake. At first, I prayed the rosary without it, but after a while, I was in too much of a daze to do it, anymore._

_“Once, after they put me on that antidepressant, I called my real therapist, my outside therapist. We talked for a couple minutes, and then, just as she was telling me she was proud of me for holding fast to who I am in such an isolating place, I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t talk, I couldn’t move. I started drooling, and after two minutes of being unresponsive, she hung up and called the facility in a panic. They hadn’t realized that anything was wrong with me, but they grabbed me and took me back to my room._

_“Samantha sat on the floor next to my bed and slipped one of the bracelets I wear every minute of every day on my wrist. It’s all white, pony beads. I could see her doing it, but I couldn’t do anything in response. That bracelet is still right where she put it._

_“Our father who art in Heaven, watch over her. I love her. I love her. I love her.”_

Patrick sat in silence, looking at those bracelets. He pulled his rosary out from under his shirt and chewed at one of the Our Father beads.

All the beads were snowflake obsidian, black and white, and he thought of the pink one he had at home, rose quartz, that he’d give to Samantha if he ever saw her again.

“Patrick,” Mr. Montgomery said, “you have written a remarkable love story. It is full of emotion I can’t say I was expecting from you. It really is a shame that I asked for the truth.”

“I t-told y— I — I warned you, sir,” Patrick said.

“What did you warn him of?” asked Miss Douglas. “I’m sorry, but I’m a little out of the loop.”

“The assignment,” Mr. Montgomery said, “was to write about the most notable thing he’d done over his summer vacation.”

“Which I did,” said Patrick. “But I warned you that I didn’t think you’d believe me, and also that I didn’t really want to talk about the most notable thing that happened.”

Mr. Montgomery sighed, like a man who had had to suffer year after thankless year.

“Patrick, just because you say things like that doesn’t mean you can go on and do things like this. Saying, _I don’t think you’ll believe me, _isn’t an invitation to lie.”

Patrick sighed. Like a fucking saint.

“It happened,” he said. “All of it. I lost all my friends in one afternoon, then I wanted to kill myself, then I admitted myself to an inpatient facility in Portland. They roomed me with a transsexual woman named Samantha. I fell in love with her, and I swear to God, it all happened.”

“This is no way to begin your senior year,” Mr. Montgomery said.

“Fine,” Patrick said. “Call my mother.”

He looked at the clock on the wall.

“She’ll be in between lessons right now. She’ll — _probably_ — just be putting the tea kettle on the stove, ‘cause she drinks a lot of Earl Grey. Ask her, say, _this is your son’s English teacher, did he go to inpatient therapy this summer, and did they room him with a transsexual woman, and did they put him on all kinds of medicine? _and she’ll say _yes. _You may think I’m a liar, but my mother never has been.”

With a cold look, Mr. Montgomery said, “dial the number.”

He grabbed Miss Douglas’s phone and pulled it right in front of Patrick. Patrick pulled the phone off the cradle and put it to his ear, dialing his parents’ number. When it was ringing, he handed it to his teacher.

“Hello, Mrs. Hockstetter. This is James Montgomery. I teach senior English, and I have the pleasure of having Patrick in my class this year. …Yes, actually, he _has_ done something.”

At the end of the phone call, Mr. Montgomery slowly hung up the phone, pale in the face.

“You have my sincerest apologies, Patrick.”

“I accept your apology.”

“However, no matter how beautiful this is, and it is, I assure you, and no matter how great it will be after it goes through the editing process, I cannot make it eligible to be published in the school’s newspaper.”

“That’s fine. But I’m curious, why not?”

“I cannot have something published that exposes alternative lifestyles like this.”

Patrick barked out a laugh.

“Last year, they published an exposé on drug use in the county, specifically in people our ages.”

“I hope you realize that transsexuality is something entirely different.”

“It’s not. But I get it, okay? First you think I’m lying, ‘cause why would a nineteen-year-old go through so much, then you think I’m disgusting, ‘cause who could ever love a girl like that?”

“Patrick, I assure you,” Miss Douglas started.

“Can I go?” Patrick asked. “We’re going over this semester’s syllabus in Science, and I’ve already missed a lot.”

Miss Douglas and Mr. Montgomery looked at each other.

“Yes,” Miss Douglas said. “You’re excused, Patrick.”

“Thank you.”

He left, and he gave himself the brief, regretful, pleasure of slamming the office door closed behind him.

He went back to class, and, silent, prayed the rosary in the back row, thinking of Samantha’s laugh.

The next day, in English class, their essays were handed back, little notes placed in the margins.

Patrick’s own essay was riddled with red ink, things like _good repetition, here _and _I can almost see her face._

He grounded himself. Gave his anger at Mr. Montgomery a leash, but a short one.

Lori pulled her desk up close to his.

“Whatcha got for me?” she asked.

“I don’t… really know if I can handle another person reading it.”

“What do you mean?” she asked. “Montgomery already did.”

“Yeah, and so did my counselor, and my mother knows about it, now, ‘cause they called her to ask if it was even true.”

She narrowed her black-lined eyes.

“Why would it not be true?”

Patrick sighed and handed it over.

She read the first few paragraphs with a blank face. Then she put the essay down and looked at him.

“Okay, firstly, fuck you,” she said.

“What?”

“You’re a damn poet.” She sighed and ran a hand through her jet-black hair. “I have tried — for _years_ — to write anything half as good as this, and you wrote it with forty minutes on your hands in a damn classroom. I fuckin’ hate you.”

He smiled, but it was tight.

“Secondly,” she said, “Just because they didn’t think it was true doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt like the truth. It feels so true to me, it’s unreal.”

“Thanks,” he said.

“Thirdly, you wanna come to Six Ravens with me on Friday?”

He huffed out a laugh through his nose.

“Yeah, I do. What’s admission?”

“Free for girls, and boys who’re wearing a dress,” she said.

“I don’t… own a dress,” he said.

“I do.” She scrawled on a slip of paper and handed it over. “Come to mine around eight.”

Friday, eight o’clock. He went to the address he’d kept in his wallet all week. Lori was sitting on the stairs that led up to the second floor of a building of apartments. He climbed the stairs, helping her to her feet.

“Thanks,” she said. “C’mon.”

They went inside. Lori’s folks were gone, both of them graveyard shift for the county jail.

They picked through the dim apartment, to Lori’s room. In it, she had strung green and purple and yellow Christmas lights up all over her walls. She led him to her closet.

“How long do you want it to be?” she asked.

“Uh. Knees?”

“You got it.”

She pulled two dresses out and handed them over. One was red and black, the other blue and black.

He chose the red and black one, holding it up to his body and looking at her like, _what d’you think?_

She nodded, then pushed him towards the door.

“Change in the bathroom,” she said.

He changed in the bathroom, balling up his shirt and pants and pulling his boots back on. Throwing his leather jacket over the dress, looking in the mirror.

He didn’t look like himself. He wondered what Samantha would think.

He swallowed, hard, and fingered at the beads of his rosary.

Then he left the bathroom, and went back to Lori’s room.

She was sitting on the floor in front of a full-length mirror, re-teasing her hair, twisting parts of it up into a mohawk.

“Why do you want to hang out with me?” he asked.

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“’Cause you met my old friends and they were disgusting. ‘Cause the first thing you heard about me was that I used to be part of their crew. Why would you think I’d be any different?”

“I just get feelings sometimes,” she said. “I read the cards, y’know? Every day, I pull a card to tell me what to expect or think about or work on, and I got one that said _friendships_ on Monday.”

“You… read cards.”

“Yeah,” she said, pointing at her bedside table.

It was littered with candles and a deck of cards, bigger than your usual.

He picked them up and flicked through them. The art was all candles and skulls and cartoonish goth girls. He smiled.

“These are cool,” he said. “Kinda… wanna know how to read them.”

“It’s real easy,” she said, checking her eyeshadow. “I could show you sometime.”

“I’d like that,” he murmured.

“C’mere,” she said. “You wanna put on some makeup?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said slowly.

He went over to her and sat next to her.

She did up his face. Skin-tone lipstick and dramatic eyeliner and bold eyeshadow.

At the end, he looked at himself in the mirror and smiled. He stood and turned one way, then the other, to get the full picture.

Without his boots and his leather jacket, he wouldn’t recognize himself.

“You look cool,” she said, putting one last pin in her own hair.

“You do too,” he said.

“Well,” she said, standing, “lemme get my flask filled up, then we can go.”

“Your… flask?”

“What, you thought only bullies like your old friends drank before twenty-one?”

“Well, no, but… I guess I wasn’t expecting it from you.”

“I’m just full of surprises,” she said, pushing past him, flask in hand.

She filled it up. He patted the inside pocket of his jacket, securing his last joint from before school began.

They left.

The Six Ravens show was on the outskirts of town in a barn. Not your usual barn party, that was for damn sure. He parked his Chevy in the surrounding pasture, and they got out, stomping on the dry dirt and dead grass, up to the door of the barn, where a loud feedback noise was ruling the space.

“Hey,” Lori said to the guy and tall butch girl at the door.

“One girl,” said the butch, making a note on a clipboard. “One guy in a dress. You both look great.”

“Thanks,” Patrick said. He swished his skirt around his legs.

“Go on in,” the guy said. “Seven Year Bitch is already playing.”

“Oh, sweet,” Lori said, taking Patrick by the shoulder and pulling him into the barn. She yelled to be heard over the feedback, “I’ve kinda always wanted to see these girls. They gotta change their name, soon, ‘cause there’s already a band called 7 Year Bitch, but they’re good. I’ve got one of their tapes and a whole bunch of their zines. Didn’t know they were playing tonight.”

“What are they?” Patrick yelled over the feedback and guitar.

“Riot grrrl,” she shouted back, pulling out her flask.

She took a swig and handed it to him.

“What — the _fuck_ — is riot grrrl?”

“It’s like… feminist hardcore… punk… rock?” she said.

“That’s… yeah, that sounds about right,” he said over the girl behind the mic howling about how her eating disorder, started by comments from her brothers, stopped her period from coming.

A few more swigs from the flask, and Lori started to dance. Patrick nodded along to the music, the hard, punk edge of the guitar, the at times underused bass, the feedback, and the drums. He could really see the appeal. He wondered what Samantha thought of music like this, if she even knew it existed.

At the end of the song, everyone applauded and whooped.

Then, the drummer stood up.

All six foot three of woman, that drummer was.

“Is she —” he started, mouth hanging open.

“Transgender?” Lori asked. “Yeah.”

“Wait, what’s —”

“_Transgender_ is what she uses for herself. Not everyone does. Transsexual is also a thing some people use.”

“Okay…”

“_Transgender_ is still kinda new,” Lori said.

“Okay. Cool.”

The drummer approached the front of the makeshift stage. The singer handed her the mic with a grin.

“My name is Lisa, and I just wanna say thank you to every guy who stepped away from comfort to wear a dress tonight,” the drummer said. “And to all the other girls we don’t see as girls, yet, I see you. I hear you. I play _for you_. If you want to talk after our set, I’ll be outside.”

Lori whooped, and Patrick clapped. He wished, so desperately, that Samantha was there. He wanted her to see this. This badass woman, standing up for people like her. Playing the drums like she was getting rid of sadness and anger.

The last song of the set was a song Lisa, the drummer, also sang on. Together, her and the lead singer howled. They sang about respecting your sisters, loving them and protecting them.

Then the song ended, and they broke down their equipment. They had no one helping them, so Patrick looked at Lori. She nodded, pushing him in the direction of the stage.

He stepped up to the stage, yelling over the din:

“You want some help?”

Lisa looked up. She looked at the other girls, and they all looked at him.

One by one, they nodded.

“C’mere,” Lisa said. “Get my high hat.”

“Got it,” he said.

He pulled himself up on stage, getting the high hat.

In silence, he helped her break down her drum set. He helped move amps and speakers and even the bass.

All into a van that barely had enough room for all four girls after everything was moved into it.

After it was over, Lisa stuck out a hand for him to shake. He took it without a single thought.

“I don’t wanna take too much of your time,” he said, “but —”

“Are you a transgender girl, too?” she asked.

“Oh, no. I’m, um, just a weird bisexual dude-person in a dress,” he said.

“Ah.”

“But — but the girl I’m in love with, she’s a transgender girl, and I think she’d really love your stuff.”

“Hey, cool.”

“I didn’t even know riot grrrl existed before seeing you all play, and now… Jesus Christ all Friday, I need one of your tapes. And an autograph.”

She smiled.

“You got two bucks?” she asked.

He pulled out his wallet and handed over the money without a thought.

“Cherry, get me a tape and a marker,” Lisa yelled over her shoulder as she lit up a cigarette.

Patrick lit one up, too, a menthol.

The bassist brought over a tape and a marker.

Lisa uncapped the marker and looked up at him.

“What’s her name, the girl you’re with?”

“Lori… oh. You mean the girl I love?”

“Yeah.”

“Samantha.”

“Your name?”

“Patrick.”

She mumbled to herself as she signed it:

_For Samantha and Patrick, love and respect always. Lisa Sharpe_

She capped the marker and handed him the tape.

“Hey, Cherry?” she asked, smoke floating out of her mouth with the words.

“Yeah, dollface?”

“We got one of those new patches?”

“Yeah.”

Cherry brought them a patch, handing it to Lisa, who handed it to Patrick.

“How much? ‘Cause I’m totally buying this,” he said.

“I’m not charging you for that,” she said. “It’s all fucked up.”

He smiled.

“Can I offer you a smoke?”

She smiled.

“Yeah, sure.”

“Clove or menthol?”

She groaned happily.

“Clove, please and thank you.”

He took one out of the pack and handed it to her. She tucked it behind her ear.

“All right, pretty boy,” she said. “Off you go.”

“It was awesome meeting you,” he said, backing away.

“Tell Samantha _hi_ for me,” she said.

He turned to find himself face to face with Lori, her eyes shining.

“C’mon,” she said, “Six Ravens is starting their set.”

Sure enough, dark, delicious bass came from inside the barn. They headed in as the first verse of the first song started up.

When their set ended, they stomped back out to the car.

“I am,” Patrick said, “_way_ too wired to drive right now.”

“Oh God, me too,” Lori said. “Shit, what do we do?”

“Smoke out?” he asked.

She looked at him and laughed. Then she got on her tiptoes to throw an arm around his shoulders.

“I like you,” she said. “I fuckin’ like how you think.”

They hauled themselves up on the trunk of his Chevy and Patrick took the joint out of his inside pocket, followed by his trusty lighter, and he lit up the joint.

Hours later:

“And you know something I didn’t write about?” he said, slowly coming down from his high.

“What?”

“They kept telling me I have a sex addiction, and I talked to my therapist, my real one, and she’s like _well, you might, but the fact that they’re telling you that based on how you’re bisexual, that’s shitty.”_

“I think I agree with your therapist, here. Like you can be a slut, you can be bisexual, you can be a bisexual slut. But one doesn’t necessarily mean the other.”

“Oh, no, I’m a slut for _sure_,” he said. “If you weren’t a lesbian, I’d’ve tried to fuck you by now.”

She nodded.

“Yeah.”

“But yeah, I don’t know if it means I’m addicted to sex, that I really, really like having sex.”

“Well, if you want sex, and you’re doing it right, I think you’re supposed to really, really like having sex.”

“Right! See, you get it.”

An hour later:

“All right,” Lori said. “I’m sober. You’re bigger than me, so you should be sober, too.”

“Yeah. Let’s go.”

They got in the car and pulled out of the pasture, onto the gravel road.

They drove through town. Patrick dropped her off, and she gave him a little salute before she went inside.

He went back to his house. His parents’ house, he guessed, as he hadn’t thought of it as his place in a while.

He went around the side, through the gate. To the ever-unlocked back door, to the basement.

He took his new tape out of the case and popped it in the player next to the couch. He laid down on the couch, volume down low, as the same speech Lisa had given near the end of their set played before any other songs.

_To all the other girls we don’t see as girls, yet, I see you. I hear you. I play **for you**._

He fell asleep listening to the drum hits, and dreamt of Samantha.

The following Monday, their essays were given back to them.

“It is my pleasure to announce,” said Mr. Montgomery, “that Lori has won our five-dollar prize, and will have her essay published in the first issue of this year’s newspaper, if she so desires.”

Patrick nodded, looking at Lori. Lori lifted her eyebrows, looking back.

Lori’s essay was actually a personal review of Six Ravens playing in Etna. She included professional-sounding critiques of their sound, their setup, their stage presence. She also talked a little about the history of the band, in and out of her life.

It was a damn good paper.

Mr. Montgomery walked the five dollars over to her, and she took it with a tiny smile.

“Lucky,” he whispered.

“Oh, you’re too kind,” she said. “Wait, _lucky_? I worked my ass off on this, that’s not _lucky_.”

He nodded, like saying _yeah, you gotta point_.

In September, the phone rang. Nearly off the hook, he listened to it ring and ring until finally, someone upstairs picked up. 

It was actually almost October, already, and he was really adjusting to Lori and the absence of his boys.

He wasn’t adjusting, however, to real life. Every single day, he missed the unit. He missed Samantha, the smoke breaks, the awful food and the scratchy blankets.

He still loved her, but he’d given up hope that Samantha was ever going to call.

So when the phone rang, he thought nothing of it.

He went on talking to Lori, talking about how Siouxsie and the Banshees was actually really, really good, and he was grateful she’d exposed him to them.

The door leading down to the basement opened. His mother called down:

“Patrick, there’s a …girl… on the phone for you.”

“What? Mother, the only girl I want to talk to is down here with me.”

“She says her name is Samantha.”

“Oh, shit. _Fuck_. Yeah, lemme pick up, then get off the line, would you?”

“Yes, dear.”

The door leading to the rest of the house closed, and Patrick scrambled for the phone. On the way to it, he grabbed the rose quartz rosary he’d bought for Samantha, wrapping it around his hand.

He picked up the phone.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hello? Is this Patrick?”

“Yes, that’s Patrick,” said his mother.

“Mother,” he warned.

“I’m going, now, Patrick,” she sighed.

He heard the _clack_ that told him she’d hung up. 

"Sam? Baby, is that really you?"

She sighed. 

"Before we talk, I want to make sure you're who you say you are. Where did we meet?"

"The adult unit, room twelve. Midnight."

He could hear her smiling when she asked, "what's my nickname in my neighborhood?"

"_Mami_. You've called me _Trick _since my first full day on the unit."

Lori lifted her eyebrows. She stood and walked away, going to look at his music collection. 

"What do I smoke?"

"Pot. Lots of it. When you're in a pinch, though, you smoke menthols."

She laughed. 

"Oh, Trick, baby… I missed you."

"I missed you, too."

"What are you wearing?" she asked. 

"Sexy," he laughed. 

"I want to picture you," she insisted. "What do you look like these days?"

"Okay, well. I'm wearing that Pink Floyd shirt, the Wall album. Black jeans, those ones that show my knees, all torn up."

"Okay," she sighed. 

"My leather jacket. The bracelets you made me, right where you put them. The rainbow necklace is in my pocket. I'm still too chicken-shit to wear it, I guess."

"Have you cut your hair?"

"Nope. It's getting really long, but I like it. I, uh. Didn't cut it 'cause I didn't want to lose anything you'd touched."

"Oh, Trick. You're such a romantic."

"Just for you, baby."

"I wish I was with you right now… I want to kiss you."

He closed his eyes. 

"I want to kiss you _so bad_, Sam."

"Yeah…"

"So they finally let you out?"

"Yeah, a week ago… I wanted to wait a while before I called you."

"Oh? Why?"

"I got… so mad at you, Trick."

"I'm sorry."

"But it's okay," she said, clearly smiling. "It was just me, being crazy. I got mad that you left, and left me there, but after I got out, I stopped thinking like that anymore."

"Stopped thinking like you did when you were locked up?"

"Yeah," she sighed. "Things are so different, outside. Cars -"

"They're so loud," he cut in. "Driving back home after I got out was fuckin' torture."

"Exactly! My sister came and picked me up, and I had a headache the whole time."

He nodded. 

He knew she had no blood family to speak of. So when she said _sister, _she meant one of the girls from her house. He still didn't really understand how it worked, other than she was a performer, and so were they, and they'd found each other and made a family. 

"How's the food outside?" he asked. "Better, right?"

"I think you'd say _Christ all Friday. _They made me fried chicken and greens my first night back, and I nearly cried. Trick, they made me _peach cobbler_. No, you know what, I have nothing to lose, here. I did cry. I cried like a baby."

He grinned. 

"I'm glad, baby."

"I want to see you."

"You free tonight?" he asked eagerly. 

"No, baby," she sighed. "Gotta ball to attend. My first after inpatient."

"What… what kind of ball?" Patrick asked, curious. 

She laughed. 

"A drag ball," she said. "But I'm free tomorrow. No work, nothing."

"Can I come see you tomorrow? And what's a drag ball?"

"Of course," she said. "It's like a pageant for people who do drag. It's all the way out in Portland."

"Mm. I still don't get it?"

"You will," she said. "Let me give you my address, then I've got to go."

"Oh _shit_," he said. He looked around. "Lori, could you get me something to write with? Please?"

Lori rolled her eyes and Samantha asked, "who's Lori?"


End file.
